‘Who?’
‘Róża,’ snapped the Dentist, his voice low and running. ‘You’re right. She’s seen us together. If you can persuade her to jump, I’ll get the passport.’
The Dentist knocked on the door and waited for the guards, rocking impatiently on his heels, his back to John. When they came, he stepped outside without even a glance behind.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Anselm’s street map led him to a parish church ten minutes walk to the west of the city centre. It stood on the edge of a residential complex by a railway line that climbed towards a bridge. Anselm could almost smell the presence of the river. Flanked by major thoroughfares, the neighbourhood was somewhere and nowhere, a triangular patch of land left behind when the road and rail people had done their bit for Warsaw’s post-war infrastructure.
Father Kaminsky spoke English quite well. His French was good, though his German was better. To get at Dante and Cervantes he’d learned Italian and Spanish, which left him comprehensively unprepared for small talk. His Russian was faultless. He liked Czech. Latin was another option, though the vocab might not cover the nuances of life under Stalin. So said the visiting curate from the United States when taxed on the phone by Sebastian. He viewed his host with unadulterated awe.
‘He’s seen everything, you know,’ said the curate to Anselm. ‘From the Nazis to the Reds. They say he smuggled Jewish kids out of the Ghetto, made Molotovs in the Uprising, and then, after Yalta, went out into the Cold. But he won’t tell me anything. Sweet whatever. He only talks about his childhood.’
They entered a parlour facing a garden running to outbuildings and a wall. On the far side lay an embankment sloping to the tracks. A train thundered by out of sight, tearing towards the bridge.
Father Kaminsky was lodged in a wheelchair, his legs painfully thin in flimsy black trousers. Bony feet in large slippers had been lodged on the footrests like pedals on a bike. A grey woollen cardigan with buttons missing hung upon his shrunken chest. Around his neck was a bright yellow scarf, The room had the feel of a passenger’s waiting room. Newspapers were heaped on a table. Anselm’s eye picked out El País, La Repubblica, the Sun.
‘Ah, my youth has come to scold me,’ Father Kaminsky said in English, fondly noting Anselm’s habit. ‘I’ll come back, one day’ He pointed towards a wicker chair, his voice throaty and soft. ‘You want to speak about Róża Mojeska.’
‘In the first instance, no,’ replied Anselm, picking up the Sun. ‘I thought we might start with Pavel, her husband. Or Stefan. Or maybe Otto Brack. Or perhaps we could just cut to the chase and talk about retribution, human and divine.’
The old man started, gently ‘You surprise me, Father.’
‘Really?’ Anselm turned the pages, not seeing. ‘Do you know this paper’s most famous headline? It’s “Gotcha!”‘
The curate knocked open the door with his knee and brought in a tray laden with tea, sliced panettone, nougat, Lady Finger biscuits and poppyseed cakes. After pouring and stirring he loitered, hoping to join in the chat, but Father Kaminsky made a firm nod towards the door. He was frail, like Sylvester back home. His bones were clear beneath the soft skin on his face. White hair, in wisps, had managed to get tangled, making him look more of a boy than a man. It was hard to believe that collaboration could leave no identifying marks. His eyes were wide, the blue running out of colour.
‘Tell me about SABINA,’ said Anselm, closing the paper. ‘The rest will come out in the wash:
I’m old school, he said, taking no nonsense. I’m telling you all you need to know and not a breadcrumb more, do you understand. You’ll be getting nothing about the Shoemaker, the Friends, Freedom and Independence. Don’t ask how I met Pavel Mojeska because I won’t tell you. Same for Stefan Binkowski. They were both shot because someone said something they should’ve kept to themselves. Trust is all well and good, but it has a boundary. It’s not an open field. And don’t ask about me. I won’t tell you. Understood? Check the door will you?
He was Sylvester in reverse. Anselm, unsteady on his feet, had a quick look: the curate had gone. The old man was rolling on with his story even before Anselm had sat down. A premonition told Anselm that playing smart with a headline had been a spectacular mistake. And the old man was talking … talking fast, as if he’d been primed to explode.
‘I approached them in nineteen forty-eight. We needed the money ‘We?’
‘I’ve already told you: don’t ask for breadcrumbs. Where was I?’
‘Money’
‘Ah, yes, and we needed to keep them at a distance.’
So he’d drawn them in to keep them out, and drawn a decent wage while he was at it. A group of prominent figures, well known to him and of interest to the authorities, had agreed that he should inform on them. Patriots with ideas. Nationalists who didn’t accept Soviet domination. They’d met regularly to decide in advance what Father Nicodem was to say They’d hoped to influence minds.
‘Whose?’
‘Theirs.’
It was a word that seemed to point. He’d identified the opposition en masse. Back then, at the beginning, the ideological conflict had been acute, cleaner, and simpler. Some people’s minds were for the taking. The country had been devastated. Something new had to be built, both psychologically and materially It was a terrible, tragic fresh start. And it was important to get the thinking right for this new purpose and the new future. It was, in fact, an opportunity for everyone to start again. But it was persuasion against imposition; words against violence. The intellectuals known to Father Kaminsky had hoped to infiltrate the system itself and lure away its agents with ideas, with arguments … to poison the entire edifice of oppression by injecting free-flowing words into its bloodstream.
‘You see, we all believed passionately that ideas matter,’ said Father Kaminsky with an old undying fervour. ‘That ideas, properly worked out, bring peace, prosperity, equality of opportunity, justice … that if we could only get them into the minds of the jailors, then they’d find it harder to turn the key that eventually — maybe not in our lifetimes, but in generations hence — the words would do their work.’
‘And the money?’ asked Anselm, weakly.
‘Paper and ink. A good education doesn’t come cheap. We thought they ought at least to pay the running costs.’
The scale of Anselm’s misconstruction was colossal. Father Kaminsky’s innocence completely demolished his understanding of Brack’s scheme and a good half of Róża’s presumed motivation. All that remained was the vindication of her child. He listened with a kind of humility, embarrassed that he’d condemned a man who’d risked so much for so long.
‘In those days, my handler was a man called Strenk,’ said Father Kaminsky ‘A hardliner with a mind dead to any feeling. Like so many of his kind, he’d separated thought and emotion. All torturers do that. It’s how they make sense of wading in blood, doing what ordinary folk could never stomach; it’s how they step back into ordinary life thinking they’re heroes.’
A few years later Brack took over. Strenk and Brack were like father and son, pupil and master and Brack was being given a chance to show he could drive the car on his own, that he could work the gears.
‘I was in my forties then, and Brack, well, I’d say his mid—twenties.’ A white hand with knotted veins rose to his mouth, touching his pale bottom lip. ‘I remember when I saw him first … this young man, this … apprentice. He was being schooled. They were forming him into their own kind. For a long time I just looked at him … at his eyes, his mouth … wondering what else he might have done with his life, other than this with them.’ The old priest’s gaping eyes burned with compassion. He spoke slowly nodding out the words. ‘He was obsessed with the Shoemaker. He wasn’t trying to please. There was something personal to his drive.’
Father Kaminsky’s meetings were, of course, limited to the report of conversations with suspected persons, but Brack never failed to remind him that he was to keep his ear to the ground
, that if he heard one word about the Shoemaker he was to let him know.
‘He was sullen and angry,’ said the old priest, abstractedly ‘My old friend Jozef Lasky used to say “Harm the boy you harm the man and Otto Brack was a man with deep wounds. Whoever was responsible carries a heavy burden … for who Brack became and for what he did.’ His face became eerily still; even his eyes ceased their slow blinking. ‘Have some panettone,’ he resumed, quietly ‘It’s the real thing. From Milan.’
A train rushed along the line, shaking the window in its frame. Anselm found his arms were folded tight as if he were cold. He’d been spellbound by the confused tussle between judgement and mercy.
‘In fifty-one Pavel told me he’d broken a rule.’ Father Kaminsky had stepped away from the first meeting with Brack. His hands became lively on his lap. ‘He’d met a stranger and brought them into the running of the operation. He wouldn’t tell me who it was and I didn’t want to know He was innocent, you see. Impulsive. He was too … good for the dirty kind of fight we were in. He was drawn to the brightness of an ordinary tomorrow I remember now, he said, “A friend is someone who was once a stranger”. What could I do? What could I say? I said we had to find a sleeper, and that’s when I found out he’d broken another rule: he’d got married. I could have wept. Marriage is trust, and trust, in our game, was a weakness. And so I met Róża. She was to be the sleeper, he said. I could have wept again.’
He told Pavel to give her his ring. It’s the worst thing he’d ever said, but Father Kaminsky had an awful foreboding that something was about to go wrong. That Pavel would go out one night and she’d never see him again; that she’d be left with nothing … sacred. Because Pavel had opened the door to someone who hadn’t been picked; he’d shaken the hand of someone who wanted to meet the Shoemaker; he’d made a Friend out of a Stranger.
He’d trusted, thought Anselm, with feeling. He’d wanted to walk in an open field without walls and fences; he’d longed to stroll beneath an open sky without having to look where he was going. Róża had made an identical mistake.
‘The first I knew about the arrests was from Brack.’ Father Kaminsky’s cheeks were nicked here and there from clumsy shaving; a hand touched the healing cuts. ‘He was spitting rage … Pavel had set up a dummy meeting so when Brack moved in, he only caught Pavel and Stefan. Pavel had tried to patch up his mistakes. He’d tested the trust of the stranger. And he paid for it.’
Willingly as did Róża, thought Anselm. He thought of the figure in hiding for whom the sacrifice had been made; this man of vision and determination, kept safe by the dedication of his Friends. How did he bear the outcome?
‘He didn’t.’ Father Kaminsky’s head was shaking slowly right and left, his voice hoarse. ‘He lost the ability to speak. He couldn’t write a single line. Freedom and Independence died with those two young men.
Father Kaminsky was broken, too. He felt responsible because he hadn’t been put against the wall. This is what happens with deep friendship. Everything is shared. And he wanted to share death. But it wasn’t his task, his duty. His job was to survive. But how could he go on? It was as though the lights had gone out in his life. Doggedly he’d carried on working with the SB. He’d ‘informed’, diligently passing on the ideas of a new generation of intellectuals who’d tired of the broken promises for change. This had been his duty, and the reason for being alive: whoever had read those files had received messages of hope. The money? Given to the families of those imprisoned for what they believed.
‘Then, in nineteen eighty-two, Róża came back.’ Father Kaminsky’s wide eyes and open mouth showed the surprise had never faded. ‘I hadn’t seen her for thirty years, and here she was, strong and sure and … forgiving. She had a message for the Shoemaker from the widow of a Friend. The fight goes on, she insisted. Tell him he has no choice, she said; tell him the choice has already been made:
Father Kaminsky looked outside, turning away from remembered emotion. He stayed like that as if waiting for his train to arrive; waiting for the guard to carry his bags and find his seat; waiting for his big trip over the bridge.
Anselm knew the rest: it was a matter of history repeating itself Róża had made the same momentous blunder as Pavel. Eventually they’d both tired of deceit and caution, suspicion and doubt. They’d decided to live as human beings. They’d chosen to live by trust. They’d said, ‘Yes’ when they should have said, ‘No’.
‘When Brack saw me in the cemetery, he knew I was linked to Róża,’ said Father Kaminsky with the look of a man tired of delays.
Anselm was quizzical. It was All Souls. He was a priest. Being there had an innocent explanation.
‘One gesture.’ Father Kaminsky smiled, the jagged cracks in his skin turning supple. ‘After Róża was taken away I turned round and looked … and he saw the expression on my face. He saw how much I cared. The scales in his eyes came crashing down — scales carefully laid one upon the other for decades until he was blind —and I said, “Join us, won’t you? We’re going to win, eventually”, and he came right up close —’ the old man leaned forward, aping the disbelief and confusion in Brack’s face, his thin arms rigid on the arms of his wheelchair — ‘and he replied, as if he were mourning, “I know you are. But don’t you see? Neither of us will join the celebrations.”‘
Of course they wouldn’t, thought Anselm. Brack had told Frenzel to name Father Kaminsky as his agent: to link him to a betrayal he could never explain away contaminating all the SABINA files in the SB archive. There and then, in the cemetery, he’d planned for Father Kaminsky’s future condemnation. He’d seen everything with frightening clarity and staggering speed.
They drank tea, Anselm eating the panettone, the old man struggling with the nougat. There used to be a wonderful shop in the Jewish Quarter that made poppyseed cakes bigger than the ones on the plate. A wall had been built twenty feet high. Children were smuggled out and hidden in homes and institutions. Father Kaminsky’s remembrances began to scatter. He moved back and forth in time, ‘they’ variously being the Nazis, the Soviets and the City Council. Brushing crumbs off his lap, he said, suddenly ‘Whoever betrayed Róża is trapped:
Anselm looked over the rim of his teacup.
‘That’s how Brack works. It’s how they made him.’
Anselm didn’t move.
‘Whoever it might be is trapped by their past.’ The old man was nodding his words again. ‘He did it to Róża and he did it to me. When you find them, don’t be too harsh:
The curate brought Anselm to the front door, wanting to know if everything had gone well. The exclusion was still eating away at his curiosity. He was staying with an unconfirmed legend, a man of rumour who wouldn’t tell any tales.
‘What did he say about his childhood?’ asked Anselm, gripping the Sun under one arm while he’d buttoned up his coat. Apparently the sports pages were muscular and without a trace of ambiguity; as for the leader page …
‘Not much, frankly’ The curate made a clucking noise, going over the dross. ‘Just that he’d been happy.’
Chapter Thirty-Six
John didn’t like the Dentist. He’d expected an ascetic, an intellectual with tortured eyes, one of the brains in the SB, whereas he’d been … what? Unconsciously vulgar? He’d wanted to impress, sporting handmade shoes and a stock-broker’s coat from Aquascutum. There’d been something wretched and lazy about his way of walking, as if he’d felt there wasn’t much point to sorting out the mess; as if there wasn’t much point to anything. The Dentist wasn’t what he’d seemed.
John’s shaking hand eventually got the key in the hole. The door yielded and he stepped into the flickering shadows of his flat. A projector clattered on the dining table, a roll of film unwinding from one spool to another. Images of tanks trundled across a sheet pinned to the wall. Soldiers tramped through the snow.
‘You’re late.’ Celina was hunched in the darkness, bent over a writing pad. Her hair was crazy, clipped back. Her glasses caught the sha
rp light. She was a wild cat in a wild night. John could just see the pencil moving. ‘What kept you? I’ve been worried.’
Do I love her? Or is it what she means to me? What she represents? Am I using her?
He drew back a chair and sat down, the projector whirring between them. ‘I got held up with a story.’
‘It’s always a story’
‘Yep, my life’s a story.’
She was everything he needed. A real dissident. Her father had been a mover in the Club of the Crooked Circle, a shaker in the Band of Vagabonds. He’d been a man of secret societies. An uncle on some side had rotted in a Tsarist prison. An aunt had been deported to Siberia and she’d died walking back. Celina’s mother had dumped the father because he wouldn’t swallow official ideology. She’d wanted the special hampers that came at Christmas for those who towed the line. She’d found a cleaner, sharper mind with access to the special shops where scarce goods could be bought at low prices. They were a family ripped apart by principle.
‘Have you eaten?’
‘I’m not hungry. What are you doing?’
‘I’ve got a meeting with the censor tomorrow I’m cutting out the best bits.’
Celina was the non-conformist renegade daughter, kicked out of school and educated underground. She dressed outside known fashion trends. Torn jeans, bright coloured socks, beads and bangles, careless scarves, huge shapeless jumpers. No makeup. Oval, dark framed glasses, windows on to a delicate uncompromising intelligence. She walked on the other side of any drawn line.
‘I’m starving,’ she said, twisting the knob. The riot police with their floppy long white truncheons vanished, swamped in darkness. Celina’s chair creaked; she was leaning back, straining for the light switch. Snap. The white sheet appeared, pinned to the wall and hanging like a shroud.
‘What happened?’ She was standing up, a hand over her mouth, her dyed hair in ordinary disarray Her tone was shocked and quiet. Moving round the table, keeping her hands on its edge, she whispered, ‘What story was this? What happened?’
The Day of the Lie Page 22
